I bought a 3D printer!

I’ve only made a few prints with it thus far – the Rocktopus of course:

I also made a spinning top in high speed / low quality, scaled down to 30% to use the rest of the Lulzbot provided HIPS filament. I didn’t have glue for the tip, and the low quality didn’t let ’em snap in – so I manually extruded filament to ‘glue’ one of the tips on – and it worked!

The first real ‘work’ I’m putting effort into is creating a side-mount panel for a Raspberry Pi 2 (Model B) to run Octoprint. I know others have done this, but it seems like everyone resorts to using screws. I checked my baggies of mixed computer/electronics screws, standoffs, etc and I don’t have anything that will work off-hand – so screw the screws! Instead, I’m going to design snap-in plugs. I’ve had some initial success, and I’ll update this post with the STL and/or a link to thingiverse with the final product. I learned the hard way that rapid protoyping means making very small, plastic-frugal test prints. My first attempt at this was the entire bracket in one go. What a waste!

For now, I figured I’d share the dimensions of the left side plate. As it’s open source and open hardware, the schematic for the Lulzbot Mini is available on the USB drive provided with purchase. The PDF that shows the schematics and dimensions is a bit of a pain in the ass to read, though. Here’s my translation to something human-readable for my purposes:

I finally arrived at a decent snap design for the holes in the Lulzbot mini. I have been using Autodesk Fusion 360 to do my modeling.

I actually own an old copy of Autodesk Inventor, but with Fusion 360 (free for broke-ass startups!) exporting via the 3d print function allows me to easily save an STL. I am syncing the files to my laptop using OneDrive, and loading the STL into Cura.

This is just a test frame. I need to validate that my dimensions are accurate – so this is a test print to see if the four snaps actually fit into the holes correctly: